Is this storage kit the best? It DEPENDS. Why is your face turning red?

I know you don't want to hear it, but YMMV, people

Common Topics

Storagebod Storage marketing is one of maddest and craziest parts of the technology industry: there are so many claims that don’t necessarily stand up to scrutiny and pretty much all of them require the caveat: "It depends…"

It is very important to understand that it really does depend on a number of factors. For example, when your flash vendor claims that it can supply flash at the price of spinning rust, it may well be making assumptions about the deduplication or compression of your data.

If you are in a highly virtualised environment, you might well get a huge amount of deduplication from the operating systems. Actually, even if you are not and you utilise SAN boot, it’ll dedupe nicely. But what if you store your operating system on local disk?

What if you are already utilising compression in your database? What if your data is encrypted or pre-compressed media?

Of course this is obvious but I still find myself explaining this at times to irate sales people who seem to assume that their marketing is always true … and that it doesn't vary depending on the client's setup.

You need to:

understand your data,

understand your access patterns

decide what you are trying to achieve and

understand true costs.

The problem is that many of us don’t have time to carry out proper engineering tests, which is why I find it best to be as pessimistic as possible… I’d rather be pleasantly surprised than have an horrible shock.

This means at times that I find myself being quite horrible to vendors – but it saves me being really nasty later. ®